'Cool' laser may have contributed to Pike County boy's death

Not one but a string of safety lapses led up to the shooting death of an 11-year-old Dingmans Ferry boy Saturday, according to local experts.

HOWARD FRANK

Not one but a string of safety lapses led up to the shooting death of an 11-year-old Dingmans Ferry boy Saturday, according to local experts.

Chad Olm, 34, has been charged with criminal homicide after his nephew, Hunter Pederson, was shot in the head while Olm was showing his handgun collection to the boy and Olm's own 11-year-old son.

"If you run a stop sign you may cause an accident, for example. It's like breaking one basic rule. In this case, Olm ran the stop sign, at 98 mph, during rush hour, with no lights on and into oncoming traffic," said Detective Christopher Boheim, a 20-year veteran with Pocono Mountain Regional Police who is also a firearms instructor. "The results have a much greater chance of ending in tragedy when numerous rules are broken."

According to police, the two boys asked Olm if they could see his handgun collection, which was in his bedroom in the basement of his parents' Wild Acres home in Pike County.

Olm removed the guns from a locked safe and showed the boys each one.

The last gun was a Glock 27 .40-caliber handgun with a laser sight. Olm said the gun didn't have a magazine in it, but he did not work the action to check or clear it, according to court papers.

Laser on, he pointed the gun at the head of his nephew and pulled the trigger.

"The very first rule is you treat every gun as if it's loaded," said Paul Gaspar of Stroud Area Regional Police. Gaspar is a school resource officer based at Stroudsburg High School and is also a firearms safety instructor with the police department.

Local firearms experts agreed the death as described by Olm was a careless, irresponsible act.

"You never store a weapon loaded. You always make sure the weapon is unloaded unless you have a carry permit," Pike County Sheriff Philip Bueki said.

His office issues carry permits for the county, but was prohibited from disclosing whether Olm had one. Olm did not require one if the guns were simply stored in his home.

"Never point your weapon at anything you don't want to intentionally or accidentally shoot," Gaspar said. "We are humans. We mess up all the time. But you're talking about firearms."

The gun Olm reportedly used to shoot his nephew does not have a manual safety, Boheim said.

"The weapon has internal safety devices but has no manual safety that is present on other firearms. In short, when the trigger is pulled and the weapon is loaded, the weapon will fire."